Facts have emerged about 55 Nigerian universities that competed for the N172.5 million research grants which the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) doled out yesterday in Abuja.
Out of the 55 universities, 13 were picked for the grants after passing the standards set by the Commission on five emerging technology areas.
The areas are 5G Development; Innovative Clean Energy; Advanced Method of Quality of Service (QoS), Quality of Experience Management and Test Mechanism; IoT Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) Technology and Monitoring and Localising Drones.
The Commission’s Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Professor Umar Danbatta, confirmed yesterday that after thorough evaluations, “13 proposals were found to have met the stipulated criteria.
” This is indeed, a clear testimony of the objectivity and complexity of the evaluation process at ensuring that the best quality is achieved and only researches that could produce prototypes with the potential of providing solutions to both local and global challenges, are selected.”
Each of the 13 successful universities across the country went away yesterday with a cheque of N20 million.
This was even as the Vice Chancellor of the Usmanu Danfodio university, Sokoto Professor Lawal S. Bilbis commended the initiative of the NCC under the leadership of Professor Danbatta.
He said Nigeria would rapidly become the hub of technology if 20 or 30 other agencies invest in such grants and endowments programmes.
He made it clear that it is only local initiative, encouraged by agencies like the NCC that would result into real technological advancement of the country, not the much-talk about transfer of technology.
